The goal of the Steam client project is a fully-featured Steam client running on Ubuntu 12.04. We’ve made good progress this year and now have the Steam client running on Ubuntu with all major features available. We’re still giving attention and effort to minor features but it’s a good experience at the moment. In the near future, we will be setting up an internal beta focusing on the auto-update experience and compatibility testing.

Since the Steam client isn’t much without a game, we’re also porting L4D2 to Ubuntu. This tests the game-related features of the Steam client, in addition to L4D2 gameplay on Ubuntu. Over the last few months, excellent progress has been made on several fronts and it now runs natively on Ubuntu 12.04. We’re working hard to improve the performance and have made good progress (more on that in a future post). Our goal is to have L4D2 performing under Linux as well as it performs under Windows.

Dades wrote on Jul 17, 2012, 18:03:Do you think Valve decides to commit millions in resources to development on inferior operating systems going nowhere if they could just stick with Windows and not worry about it? Maybe like many other people, they are worried about Windows 8 being a turd.

Since they mostly do stuff thats interesting to them, without much regard to the expense... yes, they may well do that.

Valve could completely stop developing games and live off of steam income for the foreseeable future, and still not have to worry about their income stream.

Trashy wrote on Jul 17, 2012, 17:57:Due to the sensitivity of my work I can't use google docs nor any other cloud based storage site that would put any kind of work specific data outside of the corporate firewall, It's in my company's corporate policy. Even if I could, I wouldn't trust google with handling any of my work.

And all those concerns are just about the normal cloud stuff like someone accidently sharing. In addition you never know if hackers will steal stuff. Plus that doesn't even count the intentional problems. Companies like MS sometimes put in their TOS that they get unlimited rights to proprietary stuff that goes through their servers (which means they could patent or trademark or copyright stuff just because it was sent in the cloud)